Finding answers and hope through post-Holocaust fiction is a challenge, yet this gripping audiobook succeeds because of the power of the dialogue as delivered by narrator Nina Franoszek. From the beginning, Annette Hess's novel uses an unusual approach to the 1963 Auschwitz war crimes trials in Frankfurt. The story focuses on Eva Bruhns, a naïve 24-year-old who accepts a job as a translator at the tribunal. As Eva does her job, she begins to question her own family's conduct during and after the war, and comes into conflict with Jurgen Schoormann, whom she plans to marry. Franoszek captures Eva's emotions with intensity and, at times, a surprisingly realistic tone of wonderment, both of which highlight the questions and anger bottled deep inside Eva. The result is a powerful performance by Franoszek that complements the novel superbly.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062960252
Publisher: Harper Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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